The French Revolution and Napoleon

Office Hours Spring 2025
MWF--at office in person Noon-12:30
MTWF--via Zoom--1:45-2:30 Zoom link for these times:
https://austincollege.zoom.us/j/87907673145
TH--at office in person--11:00-12:00
and by appointment or serendipity

A young and restless small-town English poet from Cumbria arrived in Paris as the French Revolution began to accelerate in 1791. William Wordsworth would come to denounce the Revolution for its violence, but even in later life, he was nonetheless able to recall his early feelings about the atmosphere of renewal, youth, and change:

OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

Five years younger than Wordsworth, Jane Austen, another product of the English countryside, wrote six novels about life around her—from the 1790s to her death in 1817--yet she hardly ever even refers to any of the great contemporary upheavals. The distance between these two lives gives us much perspective on the period. So does the close conjunction of George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette: born on different continents, they found in each other surrogate father and surrogate son. Equally full of insights is the life of Thomas Jefferson, who was in France as American Minister to France just as the French Revolution broke out. Indeed, an almost exact contemporary of Jefferson's, the greatest of German poets, Goethe, lived a life quite parallel to that Jefferson, though Goethe only reached France when the Revolution had skidded into its radical phase. The parallel lives of these two contemporary attorneys can tell us about more than legal studies. And there is the great composer Beethoven, or Madame de Staël, the great woman of letters (friend eventually to both Goethe and Talleyrand, another of our targets). Still other sets of insights emerge from the lives of the "great" French Revolutionaries, of Josephine Beauharnais, and of her husband, Napoléon Bonaparte.

The late Enlightenment had a special attachment to the idea of the family, an attachment closely connected to ideas about emotional bonds. This idea of both literal and figurative families is one of the themes we will follow closely. In between and around a large list of dramatis personae, we will also be examining the history of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Regency Period in England, the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the extinction of the Republic of Poland, and a host of interesting events of the period that interlocked to form the "dawn" of our modern world.

Families, siblings, sons, daughters: John Adams, Abigail Adams, and John Quincy Adams; the contentious Bonaparte family; court painter Elizabeth Vigée Lebrun and her daughter, Julie; Alexander I of Russia, his grandmother (Catherine the Great), and his father, whose assassination Alexander was perhaps at least aware of in advance. And many more.

It is not too much to say that the French Revolution and the era of Napoleonic dominance in Europe created the modern world and set its agenda of movements, disputes, cultural directions, religious issues, and much besides. In this course we will be examining trends, movements, people, and events all over Europe and in far flung parts of the world, in terms of the great revolutionary outburst and its effects.

You need to come to class; more than four absences will be regarded as excessive and will kick in the penalty clause, having an effect on your participation grade. I will charge a penalty of five points per day on all late papers.

This course will follow the policies on academic integrity laid out in the Environment and other official college publications. Please read these guidelines carefully; we will follow them strictly. Academic honesty is absolutely essential. This means: no cheating. If you are ever in doubt as to what constitutes plagiarism, please feel free to come by and discuss the question with me, or any other faculty member for that matter. We will also be talking about this when we get to the paper assignments. On the plagiarism issue, just remember: whenever you use someone's words or ideas, you must tell that you have used them. You must give credit where credit is due. You can find out more about what constitutes plagiarism at the excellent site, Plagiarism.org

Hist 250 The Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon

Spring 2025

Instructor, Hunt Tooley Schedule